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Low-budget way to send your stuff into space

By Douglas Heaven

Who needs a rocket to send things to space when you can use a balloon? That’s the idea of Chris Rose and Alex Baker, who have set up a firm to do just that

Your new company, Sent Into Space, sells do-it-yourself kits to send objects up into the stratosphere. How did you get started?Alex&colon; Weather balloons have been around for a while as a way to collect data. We thought it would be fun to put a camera on one and see where it went. For the first flight a couple of years ago, we just botched something together&colon; a camera, some foam we found in a bin and a GPS tracker normally used to track pets. It worked – but only just. We posted a video online, and some Canadian guys saw it and sent a Lego man up. Soon people were asking how they could have a go themselves.

How did you go from there to a business?Chris&colon; We didn’t really anticipate the attention it would get. We gave a lot of tips to people, and were getting so many requests for help that we thought we should make a kit for the non-specialist. We designed and manufactured components to make it as reliable and simple as possible. We hope to sell the finished product in shops and through our website, so that anyone can do this themselves.

Will you still advise people?Alex&colon; That’s the other side of it. If people have a project in mind, we see what we can do to make it happen. We did a launch for a music festival and a publicity campaign for the University of Sheffield. We have also worked with an astrobiologist who wanted to take samples from the stratosphere. And we do projects with schools, which is a great way to get kids enthusiastic about science in a hands-on way. They’re putting stuff into space!

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Does the kit contain everything you need?Chris&colon; You get the balloon, parachute, container for the payload, tracking devices and a computer system that we call the black box. It records the data – including GPS, altitude, pressure, humidity, temperature and acceleration. Schools really enjoy having all of that information after the flight. You just have to get the helium – we tell you the nearest provider – and apply for clearance from the Civil Aviation Authority a month in advance.

Can you describe a typical flight? How high and far can the balloons go?Alex&colon; They can go up to about 38 kilometres. That is technically near space rather than space, but you can see the blackness of space during the day. It normally takes a couple of hours for the balloon to reach that height. As the pressure drops with altitude, the balloon expands until it finally bursts; they start 2 metres across and get to about 10 metres. When the balloon bursts, a parachute opens and it takes about an hour to come down. On our website, we link to software that helps you make quite accurate predictions about where it will land – anywhere up to about 100 miles away.

What do people who buy the kits usually do with them?Chris&colon; Some people want to use it as a tool for taking pictures from high altitudes. Others want to send up their personal belongings just to be able to say they have been into space. But every project we do is exciting. We still get giddy when tracking the thing coming down.

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Chris Rose and Alex Baker are PhD students at the University of Sheffield, UK. They recently launched Sent Into Space, a firm that will sell space balloon kits at sentintospace.com

This article appeared in print under the headline “One minute with… Chris Rose & Alex Baker”